Ollie could still see the shadow, moving very slightly. He jumped up, strode out of the door and into the hall again.
There was no one.
‘Very strange,’ he said, walking back into the drawing room. To his relief the vicar was still there, and reaching for a Penguin.
‘Can’t resist these, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘What was it Oscar Wilde said about temptation?’
‘I can resist everything except temptation,’ Ollie prompted.
‘Yes, so true.’ The vicar unwrapped the end of his biscuit and bit a small piece off. ‘These always remind me of my childhood,’ he said after he had swallowed.
‘Me too.’
Ollie was feeling slightly disassociated, as if he wasn’t actually fully in his body, but was floating somewhere above it.
Suddenly the words of Bruce Kaplan, after their tennis game yesterday, came back to him.
‘Maybe ghosts aren’t ghosts at all, and it’s to do with our understanding of time . . . What if everything that ever was still is – the past, the present and the future – and we’re trapped in one tiny part of the space–time continuum? That sometimes we get glimpses, through a twitch of the curtain, into the past, and sometimes into the future?’
But they were in the present now, weren’t they? The vicar took another bite of his chocolate biscuit. Then another. Ollie stared back at the doorway. The shadow was there again, just as if someone was hovering outside.
‘Who’s that out there, Oliver? Is there someone who wants to join us?’
‘There’s no one there.’
Both men stood up and walked to the doorway. Fortinbrass stepped out, followed by Ollie. The hall was empty.
They returned to their seats.
‘It’s why I called you,’ Ollie said, and glanced out of the window, hoping Caro would not return until they’d finished this conversation. She would be an age, he knew – it would take her a good couple of hours to finish her shopping. But nevertheless he worried.
‘Please feel free to speak openly. Tell me anything that’s on your mind.’
‘OK, thank you. When I went to see Bob Manthorpe on Thursday, he told me some quite disturbing rumours about this house. He said that every county in England has a diocesan exorcist – or Minister of Deliverance, I believe you call them? Someone to whom clergymen can turn when something happens within their parish that they cannot explain. Is that correct?’
Fortinbrass nodded, pensively. ‘Well, broadly, yes. You want me to see if I can arrange someone to come here?’
Ollie watched the vicar’s eyes move back to the doorway. The shadow was still there, lurking.
‘Tell me something, you seem a very rational man to me, Ollie. Are you sure you want to open yourself up to this? Might it not be preferable to close yourselves to whatever is bothering you, ignore it and wait for it to go away?’
‘You’ve seen that shadow out there, right, Vicar – Roland – Reverend?’ He pointed at the doorway. There was nothing now.
Fortinbrass smiled, amiably. ‘It could just be a trick of the light. A bush moving outside in the wind.’
‘There is no wind today.’
Fortinbrass cradled his mug and looked thoughtful.
‘I’m an atheist, Roland. I had religion drummed into me so much at school. All that Old Testament stuff about a vengeful, sadistic, egotistical God who would kill you if you didn’t swear undying love to him? What was that about?’
The vicar studied him for some moments. ‘How God presents himself in the Old Testament can indeed challenge all of us, I can’t deny that. But I think we need to look to the New Testament to find the true balance.’
Ollie stared hard back at him. ‘Right now I’m prepared to accept anything. We’re living a nightmare here. I feel like we’re under siege from something malign.’ He glanced up, warily, at the ceiling, then his eyes darted around at the walls, the doorway. He shivered.
Fortinbrass set his mug down on the table and placed the Penguin wrapper next to it. ‘I’m here to try to help you, not to judge you. Would you like to tell me exactly what has been happening?’
Ollie listed everything he could remember that had happened. His mother-in-law’s first sighting of the ghost. His father-in-law’s encounter with her. Caro’s sighting of her. Jade’s friend’s sighting. The spheres he had seen. The bed rotating during the night. The taps. The photograph of Harry Walters. Parkin then Manthorpe being found dead. The computer messages. The emails to his clients. He omitted only the curious déjà vu he had experienced over the vicar’s arrival this morning.
When he had finished he sat back on the sofa and stared, quizzically, at the clergyman. ‘It sounds mad, I know. But, believe me, it’s true. All of it. Am I insane? Are all of us?’
Fortinbrass looked deeply troubled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I believe you.’
‘Thank God,’ Ollie said, feeling a sense of deep relief.
‘I’ll put in a request. I’m not sure of the formalities, but I will ask.’
‘There must be something the church can do,’ Ollie implored. ‘We can’t go on like this. And we can’t leave – if we could, we’d be out of here like a shot. But there must be something – something you can do to help us, surely?’
An hour later, as Ollie stood in the front porch watching the vicar’s car heading away, Caro’s Golf appeared.
‘Hi, darling,’ she said, as he opened her car door for her. ‘Who was that?’
‘The vicar,’ he said.
‘And – what did you tell him?’
‘Pretty much everything.’
She walked round to the rear of the car and opened the tailgate. The boot was crammed with white and green Waitrose carrier bags.
‘I’ll help you in with everything,’ he said.
‘So what did the vicar say? Was he sceptical or helpful?’
Ollie hefted out four heavy bags. ‘He saw something himself, while he was here.’
Following him into the house, holding a clutch of grocery bags herself, she said, ‘Did he have a view on it?’
‘He took it seriously.’
‘Great,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’
They dumped the bags on the refectory table. Ollie took her in his arms. ‘We’ll get this sorted, darling, I promise you. In a year’s time we’ll be looking back on all of this and laughing.’
‘I’m laughing right now,’ she said. ‘I was laughing all the way down the supermarket aisles. Just how much fun has our life become, eh?’
43
Saturday, 19 September
Early that afternoon Ollie glanced out of the tower window to the north, and for some moments watched Jade and her friend, Phoebe, standing at the edge of the lake looking playful and happy, throwing something – bread perhaps – to the ducks.
Throughout his own childhood, which had not been particularly happy, he had longed to be an adult and get away from the dull and stultifying negativity of home. But right now he envied them the innocence of childhood. Envied them for not having to deal with arrogant shits like Cholmondley. He knew childhood and growing up were fraught with their own traumas, but with everything that was bombarding him right now, he’d trade places in an instant.
What had the vicar’s first appearance been about? He’d seen him, he’d spoken to him, and yet – suddenly he was gone. Then reappeared. He thought back again to his conversation after tennis with Bruce Kaplan, trying to make sense of his theory. ‘We live in linear time, right? We go from A to B to C. We wake up in the morning, get out of bed, have coffee, go to work, and so on. That’s how we perceive every day. But what if our perception is wrong? What if linear time is just a construct of our brains that we use to try to make sense of what’s going on? What if everything that ever was, still is – the past, the present and the future – and we’re trapped in one tiny part of the space–time continuum? That sometimes we get glimpses, through a twitch of the curtain, into the past, and sometimes into the future?’